Nikki Bella and John Cena’s Wedding Work
A “work” is a wrestling term fans use when they know a story line is all for the cameras but the wrestlers try to sell it like real life. Earlier this year Rhonda Rousey was rumored to be making her debut at the “Royal Rumble” while WWE and Rousey’s representatives all claimed she was out of the country and didn’t have a contract yet. So of course in the very last minutes of the Royal Rumble pay-per-view out came the MMA superstar. It was a work. If you love wrestling you know it happens but you love it anyway.
However, last year’s Wrestlemania had a different kind of work. John Cena broke character at the end of the couple’s match against the “it” couple The Miz and Maryse and got down on one knee to propose to Stephanie Nicole Garcia-Colace (aka Nikki Bella). Cena’s mother was in the front row and the entire WWE Universe celebrated.
Nikki and John’s relationship has been chronicled to some extent on WWE reality shows, “Total Divas” and spinoff “Total Bellas.” While the Bellas twins, Nicole and Brie, have seen a huge increase in their fan base, Cena was seen as cold, uncaring and stiff in real life. He was a self proclaimed control freak that had Nicole sign a 75 page contract to move in and when they took in the rest of her family after an untimely neck injury his list of rules were more than just TV fodder. To top off the rule heavy wrestling superstar, he made sure Nicole understood in nearly every episode that he had no interest in marriage or children.
As season after season John proclaimed that marriage and children weren’t for him and that story progressed into the WWE storyline as The Miz and Maryse chided Bella that she would never get a proposal from her true love in the lead up to Wrestlemania. The rumors started to fly that a proposal was imminent but Nicole dismissed the chatter as ridiculous. Even as bookies in Vegas took bets on the proposal, Nicole seemed shocked when Cena went down on one knee.
Several days before the latest season of Total Bellas and 3 days before their planned nuptials, John and Nikki announced their split. As the season has unfolded it has focused on Nicole’s bond with sister Brie’s baby daughter Birdie and how that has made her realize that she just can not live without being a mom. Of course that is news to Cena and he reaffirms his commitment to never fathering a child. Except in the press this week he has shown a propensity to change his mind on the issue and rumors swirl that the couple are now on the road to being back together.
So we have to ask if this is a work.
All of the evidence points to this being for ratings. There is a small chance they announced the split because the season was going to show their struggles as a couple and it was too much to take as the wedding approached but that scenario seems unlikely. The new season has shown a lighter side of John which fo course looks like a response to the criticisms he has taken for the last few seasons of the show and the timing of everything is just a little too coincidental.
Our best guess is that these WWE professionals knew exactly how to get the ratings up and never planned on a May 5th wedding, I mean who gets married on Cinco De Mayo in Mexico anyway? The ratings for the show are definitely up with all of the added press and it looks like they may be heading for a fall wedding after all.
We will still be glued to our TV’s as the saga unfolds but let’s face it, WWE knows how to suck us in with a “work” anyway.
